Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc)

Golden Bear for Best Film winner

Something to offset the intake of staid and middlebrow filmmaking – always an imminent diet risk during a festival run – Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a three-part dissection of modern-puritan values, delivers a sharp tonic through abundant visual flourishes and heavy, excessive didacticism. What’s not to like? Writer-director Radu Jude has crafted an ornate imagistic and verbal feast, in which a teacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), is held in successive courts of public opinion: judged when walking down the street, judged by the weight of history – and ultimately – judged in an ad hoc trial, presided over by the headmistress of the school where she works.

The general condemnation reeks of bourgeois complacency and Jude, if the verbose and insistent script is anything to go by, has had enough. Emi’s crime? That a sex tape in which she features has leaked and gone viral, bringing into disrepute her professional reputation and purported role-model status. Facing a blitz of sexist reckoning as she goes about her day-to-day in Bucharest, Emi is a figurative conduit for society’s tendency to pompous prurience and the film captures her harassment at the hands of a deadened and moralistic population, using precise pans to invite onwards the motley set of agitators and antagonists.

The director’s essential diatribe is against contemporary hypocrisies and he’s keen to harness the vagaries of the current moment in service of his assault. Covid masks provide the dramatic pivot in several scenes, an ironic counterpoint to the fluffy eyewear Emi adorns in the scandalous video, that which fails to protect her identity. A dictionary of pop culture buzzwords appears dotted throughout the movie and there’s a suitably scattergun satirical approach to conspiracy theorists, feeble liberals, commodified revolutionaries and the resolute disciples of pious self-righteousness. The sex itself is frankly and explicitly depicted, functioning as an artistic and ethical defence of pornographic acts.

The visual and sonic reintroduction of this intimate video for the concluding “trial” provokes an agonising display of lascivious finger-wagging in the mob, spotlighted by droll interrogative zoom shots. It’s not long before the discussion turns pseudo-philosophical, with extended risible appeals to Freudian psychoanalysis and the devout works of St Thomas Aquinas. Preceding this, the middle-section deployment of montage to illustrate the horrors of recent European history is striking and unsettling, but the filmmaker largely asserts (a little too keenly) his lightness of touch. As the viewer senses Emi’s martyrdom is complete, several encores, punctuated by lurid pink intertitles, together reveal that it’s not only Emi who’s about to get fucked.

Joseph Owen

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc) does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2021 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.

Watch the trailer for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc) here: